1022 WOMEN WRITING CULTURE

Professor Andrew Bank, Department of History, University of the Western Cape

This two-lecture course will explore the creative writing of women anthropologists who shaped modern social anthropology in southern and central Africa in the mid-twentieth century. The first lecture will consider the works of South African anthropologist Hilda Beemer Kuper during the 1940s and 1950s, including her writing about Swazi culture. Hortense Powdermaker and Edith Turner are the focus of the second lecture. These scholars associated with the Rhodes-Livingston Institute in Northern Rhodesia during the 1950s also draw on their fieldwork: their books Stranger and Friend and The Spirit of the Drum reflect the creation of a more ‘self-reflective’ modern anthropology.

Powdermaker, H. Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist . New York: W.W. Norton.

Date: Thursday 18–Friday 19 January

Time: 3.30 pm

COURSE FEES Full: R205,00 Staff: R100,00 Reduced: R55,00

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Andrew Bank is Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape. His main intellectual project has been to recover the involvements of European and white South African women and Africans in the creation of hybrid knowledge about colonial societies in Africa. He is former chair of the History Department, former editor of Kronos: Southern African Histories, a leading journal of southern African history, and recipient of several book awards and research fellowships, most recently an Oppenheimer Fellowship at Oxford in 2015 and a Cogut-Mellon Fellowship at Brown University in 2017.